Container Houses

Permits and other factors

2011-12-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

I've been getting a lot of email recently. People really do read my posts. I'm not surprised that people are talking about building again and I'm happy that they are taking a look at alternatives like cargo containers. Every body that writes to me already sees the value, sustainability and low cost as being what people need right now. There are a lot of questions about how to approach the building department. As you've read in previous posts it's not the technical part that's difficult getting a permit, it's the cost. It seems like costly system development fees and long drawn out design reviews put a lot of people off. There is a way around that.

In most neighborhoods in cities built early in the last century there are houses which didn't get regular maintenance. Even before the current fore-closer mess houses sat vacant. If there not tuned up periodically nature takes them back. Sills rot and roofs leak causing all sort of damage. Usually their small and it didn't make sense to redevelop back in the boom. If you want to build a container house this is the thing you want to buy. The way the rules work in most municipalities if you save part of one wall of an existing structure than your doing an extensive remodel, you are not doing not doing new construction. The water pipes to the meter are still there and the sewer is already hooked up. This saves vast amounts of money on permits. Picking the right place could save you the cost of a small container home. Fee's in Portland, Oregon for new raw land construction run about $34,000. I built my last house here for about $32.000.

Hall Mark

2011-03-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

This month when I picked up the rent check from the people that live in my container house I realized that I'd reached break even on my project. They pay $850.00 (usd) a month and I have been cashing a check for that amount every month for the last three years. My total cost to build that house was $30,000 and change. From here on out, excluding whatever maintenance costs may come up, I will be making money.

Aside from the other benefits of building green housing, container built residential construction makes money, fast. Amortizing the total cost of an investment over a three year period is very fast. Where else are you going to double your investment capital in three years? And that house isn't going anywhere. I'll continue to cash rent checks every month from that property for years to come. Building green has been the best investment I have ever made.

And this has happened during the worst recession in history. Sure I live in an area that has good rental rates but the truth of the matter is that because of low project cost I have been able to set my rents in the low end of the available housing market. This guaranties that I will always have renters lining up to live in the home I've built.

I challenge you to look around the rental market in the area that you live in and see if you can't make a little money for your family too.

Commercial Space

2010-07-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

So far I've covered the use of containers as residential structures. In this post I want to discuss a project idea that was brought to me by a local commercial property developer. I think maybe, first, a little background material that will help illustrate my point. The commercial property market in the United States, as a whole, looks pretty bleak right now. Nationally we have huge amounts of vacant commercial space. So much so that the underlying equity value of commercial property is open to question. Projects that were financed and constructed during our recent boom times are still carried on the books at the value they were projected to be worth during the boom. The truth is that the current actual value of commercial properties is much, much lower than book value. It will take years for this difference to equalize, if it ever does. The market recognizes this but it's not in anybodies interest to rock the boat. During the good times you could use the equity value of a preforming property to finance the construction of your next deal. And so now most commercial property is leveraged sky high and the underlying values that supported all this expansion have vastly depreciated. Nobody wants to be caught holding an empty bag so commercial property financing has dried up. If you can't build equity in commercial property at the moment then the next best thing you can do is create cash flow.

There are several parts of Portland that continue to thrive in spite of the national trends. As in almost every major city in the country there are areas that continue to gentrify. These old neighborhoods are undervalued to begin with and so draw the kind of people that always are looking for cheap rent, the creative community. Young families soon move in to these new enclaves and the property values rise. Eventually more traditional property developers begin to recognize whats happening and support the new community with commercial growth. The Alberta Arts District, here in Portland, is my local example. Most of the larger commercial buildings along Alberta Street have already been redeveloped into cute retail spaces, restaurants and the ubiquitous coffee bar. There are, however, several vacant undeveloped lots along Alberta Street. These are being rapidly filled with Portland's latest craze, food carts. The city of Portland to encourage entrepreneurial enterprise made it legal to operate restaurants kitchens inside mobile trailers. The quality and diverse selection of food this delivered very quickly caught on. There are now, in almost every neighborhood, previously empty lots packed with as many food carts as will fit. The property owner simply had to provide a network of power supplies and a shared water source, creating instant cash flow. Inevitably there will be a shake out as the weaker businesses fail and the large number of the locations contracts to right size themselves to the market. What I find most interesting in all this is that the people that owned these vacant unproductive lots have found a way to turn a small initial investment into a cash machine.

The same week that the Bethel Island project dissolved I was contacted by a local commercial property developer. He has several vacant lots on Alberta Street and is farsighted enough to see the eventual contraction in the food cart market and so doesn't want to over invest in that kind of improvement. Rather, he is open to the idea of creating an arcade of small retail spaces by using a combination of 20 and 40' containers on a 10,000 square foot L shaped lot in the heart of the Alberta Arts District. Really this whole concept was his idea, its brilliant. The financial thinking is that you invest just enough to create cash flow and forget about expensive equity building improvements. The rents while individually lower are collectively as high as you'd expect for a strip mall per square foot and he won't have a huge mortgage to service. It's exciting, sure there will be a bunch of turn over but by pricing each 20' unit at around $400 he won't have a shortage of people waiting for a chance to try their hand in a retail space on a good street. If it pans out this concept could spread to newly gentrified neighborhoods all over the country.

And this is how it ends

2010-07-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

I got a call last Monday from the client. He let me go. The project had gotten too expensive. This wasn't really a shock, I'd sensed for some time that he was getting frustrated. It was a decision he took based on the most simple economic model. Other comparable houses on Bethel Island have been losing equity value over the past couple of years due to the effects of the burst housing bubble. Our current estimate of costs, which were driven at least partly because of county requirements (more on that later), had risen past the recent sales prices of these other comparable homes. To put it simply you should never build the most expensive house in the neighborhood. The average home on the levee at Bethel Island that was built high enough to overlook the water currently sells for about $350.000. The client paid about $100,000 for the lot. You'd think that building with containers you could construct a home overlooking the water for $250,000, well, not quite.

The first big hit came when we found out that the soil we wanted to build on was composed of peat moss. The soils engineers' recommendation was that we sink a number of piles at least thirty feet into the ground. He specified 14" square pre-stressed concrete piles. I checked around and the best price I could find was $3300 each. When I asked the structural engineer how many we would need he told me about twenty. When you add the grade beams that had to be formed, rebar added and poured the cost of the foundation could easily have risen to over $80,000. I talked the engineers into letting us use 12 round wood piles instead but the final costs still would have run about $50.000.

The next huge hit was due to the clients need to overlook the water. That is the big draw to living on the river but it came with a cost. In order to build the house high enough to get above the FEMA designated flood zone we had to put the habitable space above the second story. As you can see from the plans we had two habitable floors, a modest 2500 square foot home. However you cannot built a Type 5 residential structure higher than three stories or 40 feet.
The rules for building a Type 5 house are the ones that most people are familiar with, standard wood frame construction. It is also the least expensive form of residential construction. For our structure to qualify for the Type 3 designation we learned that to begin with all exterior walls had to have a two hour fire rating. As the walls of containers are made of non combustible steel you would assume that that wasn't going to be a problem. You'd be wrong. The fire rating of walls has to do with the combustibility of the whole wall system. And as we found out there is no UL rating for steel container wall assemblies. If you've really set your heart on this sort of thing you can hire UL to do this sort of testing but bring your wallet it's expensive. The alternative was to completely frame and sheet the structure with UL fire rated materials. I'm not sure which alternative would have cost more.

Lastly there was a water issue. This, however, didn't have anything to do with actually having water. All the houses on Taylor Road are served by a private water cooperative that run three different wells supplying 65 lbs of water pressure to each home. My initial inquiries about joining the co-op were well received. I was told there wasn't going to be any problems. But then something unexpected came up. Part of the county requirements were that we should have 8000 gallons of reserve fire fighting water on the property. This is not unusual when building in a rural area where there are no municipal water mains with fire hydrants to hook up to. What I didn't know was the communities history with the county's fire department. In order reduce their budget, because California is broke and they have to, they are planning on closing the fire house on Bethel Island. For decades the community had a volunteer fire brigade that was very effective. But a few years ago the county, because they thought it would be better, built their own fire house on Bethel Island and demanded that the volunteer fire brigade disband. This caused a lot of bad feeling in the community which only got worse. The new county fire department quickly got a reputation for letting houses burn to the ground rather than fight the fire. I'm sure they had excellent reasons for just controlling the possible spread to other homes but that didn't make the person whose house caught fire any happier. Really, how may of us have enough insurance to pay for a complete rebuild. To say that the residents I talked to about this were bitter is a vast understatement. When word got out that we were going to comply with the reserve water request all hell broke loose. The current residence which control the water co-op see this as the thin end of the wedge, a prelude to making them all install fire fighting tanks. The result, I gather, was that we would be drilling our own well (200+ feet to get to clean water). Wells aren't cheap and it's hard to get a permit besides. What makes this particularly bizarre is that we were building next to a river.

I'd like to build a house for somebody in the Bay Area. I've got the use of a factory to fabricate in. I've got great guy's that I trust to work with down there. But this is the second time that I've looked at a project there and until the state of California gets it's act together I doubt I'll be interested in investing my time or energy further there.

This Is How It Starts

2010-05-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

This week I'm going to order a survey. I'll have a drawing done for a retaining wall and hire a crew of guy's to build it. When it's ready we need to start back filling soil onto the site. You can get free dirt dropped on a piece of land but it doesn't all arrive at once. Each time a dump truck shows up you need to have a guy with a tractor push it around. That's the real cost, the guy with the tractor. Fortunately Bob Aiken's lives three doors down. Bob's one of them guy's that never retires. He runs the tiny water company that feeds the houses on our part of Taylor Road. Three separate wells are connected together and provide pretty good water pressure. When I called on him to talk about hooking up our water I found a well maintained tractor in his yard. He works on an hourly basis that's very fair and he knows the local guy's with dump trucks. It can't get more automatic. The average dump truck holds about twelve cubic yards of dirt. On the back of a napkin I figured we will need 180 yards of dirt just under the building envelope, let alone bringing the entire property up to grade. This all takes time. I figure that if I start calling for dirt within two weeks that it will take the entire summer to get enough on site to do the job. If you try and rush this it will consume vast quantities of money. Patience is called for here, not something I have much of to begin with, but let's consider the alternative.

www.bbtandex.com

Check out this guy's website. He's a local Portland builder with with the right equipment and experience to do the job. Try to imagine how much he has to pay out every month to keep his doors open. I can assure you that he's not getting rich doing this kind of work. I don't begrudge him a penny of what he charges to do what he does. It's hard work even with the equipment. So you can imagine how lucky I feel that Mr. Aiken's lives three doors down.

The Client

2010-05-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

I met the client for the first time last week, his name is Clark. I've quit estimating the number of emails that it's taken to get to this point. Before we found out about the delay due to the variance he had booked a flight back from his home in Panama. I drove down from Portland to meet him at the site Tuesday morning. I tried not to bring a lot of expectations of what the guy would be like. I was kind of surprised to find out he looks a LOT like me. Same age, hair line, frown lines, I could go on.

We met with the engineers. We decided to go with the local guy's that were recommended by a construction company on the island. The companies name is Advanced Engineering and the principle engineer is named Gabe Del Porto. Clark wanted to check that the bid was based on a complete scope of work to finish the project. I got the feeling that he was making sure I was doing my job correctly. I didn't mind that, after all, he's got a lot riding on me. We went to the county offices to do basically the same thing We also got a person to talk to at their public works offices. That person is in charge of collecting about twenty one thousand dollars of the permit fee's that we were quoted.

On my previous trip down I had to get the plans stamped by both Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District and the Iron House Sanitary District. These approvals are required before you can apply to the county for a permit. When I spoke with the woman at Iron House she told me that they already carried that address on their books. I asked her to research their history and she told me that there was a house on the site up until 2003. It had apparently been demolished sometime after that. The upshot was that they gave me a waiver from the eighty eight hundred dollar fee that they charge for new construction. With the client standing next to me at the Contra Costa County public works counter I used that information to get a waiver for the twenty one thousand dollar fee they were charging for new "raw" land construction. That made a good impression on the client.

We went to Oakland that afternoon to see American Steel. It's an old steel warehouse that my friend Dan Das Mann has taken over and turned into a three quarter of a million square foot studio specializing in art metal fabrication. It's equipped with a 10 ton trolley crane in each bay. Our steel fabricator, Steve Valdez, has his shop set up there. If you start out with a complete set of building plans with everything detailed you can get any competent guy with a tool belt to build for you. When your doing a design/build you need the kind of creative thinking that an artisan brings to the table.
Clark was deeply impressed by both the scope and scale of activity that happens at American Steel. Just before he left to catch a flight home he told me "I'll be back in October, have a house ready for me." That kind of faith made a good impression on me.

Planning and Zoning

2010-04-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is where it fell apart in Santa Cruz. The couple I was building for were blindsided by the cost of the building permits. Santa Cruz wanted upwards of fifty thousand dollars for their permit. This last week Contra Costa county handed me an estimate of thirty-seven thousand five hundred and told me that I'd need to apply for a variance to the height restrictions and limit of floors in a residential structure. They added that it would take three to six months to process. This isn't the type of news you want to take back to your client. Sixty-five hundred of that is to go to the school district. Twenty thousand is supposed to go for road construction. That's about twelve percent of the entire construction budget. I was so pissed off that I almost attended a tea party. The client, like any sane man, said that he'd have to consider his options. I spent my last night in the Bay Area drinking, unhappily. The next morning I found an email from the client asking how soon we could apply for the variance.
The variance was indicated because we'd designed the house to both comply with the flood plane regulations and bring the living floors up above the top of the levee. The majority of the homes on Taylor Road are constructed this way. I'd assumed that the county had realized that grade, being 13 feet below sea level, was going to effect what kind of houses were going to be built on Bethel Island. I can understand that you don't want your neighbor building a four story house next to your two or at the most three story tract home. But nobody builds tract homes 13ft below sea level. I looked into what variances were granted on the twenty homes closest to our building site. Twelve of those houses have had to get a variance. You are no longer varying from the norm when the majority of the houses have the same variance. That seems clear enough doesn't it? And if they processed these things in a timely manner I don't think I'd be so upset, but three to six months? Is this what scars the hell out of people when they visualize a future of government run health care.

This link will take you to the document set that we submitted to Contra Costa county.

http://www.becausewecan.org/files/container_house/041610_1472Taylor.pdf

The plans are beautiful. I know it's a cliche to remark on how computers have changed everything but these are the state of the art in Building Information Modeling or BIM. The topography is so well detailed that you really get a feeling for how the structure works in it's surroundings. The program, Autodesk Revit, lets you take the basic design even further by allowing you to convert the planning documents into actual detailed building plans that incorporate everything from engineering detail to lighting plans. So cool.

The Engineering Bid

2010-03-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most important aspect of building with containers are the modifications of the boxes themselves. I assume that if your reading this blog that you are already familiar with the characteristics of conex boxes. Forty foot hi-cube conex boxes are capacity rated to carry over 80,000 lbs. They stack full containers aboard ship at least five high, so they have both solid floors and virtually crush proof corners. Both sides and top are really just curtain walls, however, they provide enough shear wall strength to keep the whole from racking and the floor from sagging.
Every engineer that I've spoken to about using containers always refers to them as box girders. Their calculations concerning the removal of sections of the curtain wall, whole lengths of wall as well as windows and doorways, come down to proving that modifications do not violate the integrity of the box girder.
This is a section drawing of an interior container wall in one of the pylons of the house on Bethel Island. Where the curtain wall was removed a steel square tube 2x4" header on 2x2" square tube posts re-supports all the loads. These were the engineered modifications used on the Portland project when joining two containers side by side with open walls. Since we are modifying standardized structures we can design using standard pre-engineered modifications. The steel 2x5 1/2 square tube at the bottom of the container has yet to be engineered. It has welded clips attached to receive glue laminate beams that will carry the center span between the container pylons. They are supported underneath by 4x4" steel posts to carry the point loads down to the foundation.

Our preliminary report from the soils engineers is that their foundation recommendation will be for the use of grade beams set on driven piles. When I have built previously with containers the foundations consisted of grade beams that spanned only the ends of the containers but included footings to support the point load of the posts. I expect that will be how the structural engineer will handle this project. I have never worked with driven piles before so it's inappropriate for me to present a foundation sketch. As you can see these sketches could easily have been done on cocktail napkins. I've hired a real draftsman to put this idea across to the engineers that are about to receive my Request For Proposal.

I've collected other appropriate modifications, such as welding the corners together and how to design embed points in the foundation footings to weld a project to the ground. These will come in handy, too. The better you can explain what you want to do to an engineer the more helpful and efficient they are going to be. You are going to want to make sure that they are looking at the type of containers you are building with. I once hired an engineer that used as his model containers that did not have a square tube top rail. The modification that he designed used custom steel headers that would have cost five times as much as off the shelf steel. I ended up paying for the redesign, it was not cheap either.

Professionals

2010-03-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

You can only go so far with Google Sketch Up. In order to build the kind of documents that you need to pull permits you need to go to the professionals. While you aren't legally bound to use an architect to design a residence when you get ready to summit your design to the planning authorities clear understandable drawings are a major asset. It's also going to help when you hire structural engineers. Clear drawings are going to save you money with these guy's, they charge by the hour, the quicker they understand where your going the better.
Last week we hired Jeffrey McGrew as project draftsman to produce planning sheets. Jeffrey is an old friend of mine that works out of Oakland, California. He wrote his masters thesis on the use of cargo containers as modular building components about eight years ago. Other friends of mine had been using containers for art studios in San Francisco by that point but Jeffery gave it that academic gloss that got me to take them seriously. We've hired him to produce regular two dimensional drawings and electronic files that will transfer easily for use by the structural engineers.
He'll initially produce the elevation and plot plan drawings needed to apply for permits from the Contra Costa County Planning Department. They will check that the zoning is in order and that the building conforms to the restrictions applicable to building on Bethel Island. These restrictions include all the requirements for building in a flood zone. We will have to get a civil engineer to confirm grade height before construction begins and recheck afterward that the habitable space is above flood level, After we receive plannings permission we will develop the detailed construction plans.
We hired soils engineers this week. Before you can build a house you have to build a foundation. Before you can build a foundation you need to know what the ground is like beneath the surface. We are particularly challenged by this building site. Bethel Island owes it's existence to a levee that was first built around the island by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Without the levee the island would now be 12 feet under the waters of the Sacramento River. Before the Corps decided to control and channel the flow of the river Bethel Island was already very soggy marsh land. Repeating over the centuries the plants on the island died and were pushed down by new growth. All that plant matter turned itself over time into what's known as peat moss. Peat has the consistency of a really old kitchen sponge. This peat bog is on average about 34 feet deep on Bethel Island. Everybody knows this, the county building department, the municipal district and the old guy that lives next door to the site that used to be a soils engineer before he retired. The thing is in order to plan the foundation you need to have an up to date soils report. We went out to bid with two different companies and selected the company that used the least intrusive test bores. The losing bidder wanted to use a very expensive drill rig that he didn't own. It's cost was in addition to his fee for the report. His proposal estimated total cost ranging from $7000 to $11,000 depending on the number of holes drilled. Berlogar Geotechnical Consultants of Pleasanton, California was selected based on a total price of $6800. They use a drill method called CPT and they own their equipment. As the soil conditions in the area were already well documented I wonder what the first guy thought he was going to find in the extra bore holes.
All that we have done to this point is called the site work. If we had needed to cut a road or seriously graded the site that would have added additional expense not just in actual work but in the production of professional reports that cover everything from protection of riparian habitat (bird nests) to water runoff control. Depending on where you want to build you can easily go through many tens of thousands of dollars completing your site work. It's pretty laid back on Bethel Island. I think they have figured out that if you really want to build a house on a peat bog you've already got enough problems.

Preliminary Design

2010-03-09T22:42:00.001-08:00

Our design consists of two pylons of four forty foot long hi-cube cargo containers with a span section separating them by sixteen feet.
The lower levels provide parking and storage. It also raises the habitable spaces above the flood plane, a requirement for building on Bethel Island.
The third level contains the living area, kitchen and a half bathroom. It is entered by way of an interior stairwell . There are decks both fore and aft between the pylons. The rear deck connects by footbridge to the top of the levee and the boat dock.

The forth floor has three bedrooms. The master bedroom has its own separate bathroom with the two remaining bedrooms sharing a bathroom.
The center span connecting the pylon sections will be built as a steel framework supporting glue laminated beams and decking. The span walls will use as much glass as is practical to provide stunning views of both the island and the delta as well as interior day lighting.
As the design progresses we will add windows to the exterior container walls to provide both cross ventilation and lighting. The roof is flat across the whole structure with a slight slope to manage runoff. It's currently planned to pour a light weight concrete roof topped with a waterproof membrane.

From The Ground Up

2010-03-05T17:51:00.000-08:00

I have a client. Since looking at the property in Santa Cruz last year things had been slow. But I've been seeing sure signs of economic life coming into bloom. People aren't as shell shocked about life as they seemed last year. All the fear that was poured into society didn't poison the well. The most common response to all the dire predictions that I saw, and I traveled a lot last year, was the planting of gardens. Everywhere I went I saw people building raised beds and turning compost into the soil. I thought "What a marvelous response. I'm glad I live among a people of such grace". As Voltaire wrote "We must all tend our gardens."

This blog, by the way, has been very effective at getting information to people who are interested in actually building. My new client is a guy that retired from the petroleum processing business and lives for at least part of the year in Panama. He owns a piece of land in a community called Bethel Island on the Sacramento River delta in northern California. He and I are into about a 250 email relationship at the moment. We exchange drawings using Google Sketch Up and have produced a design that's ready to develop.

This is the building site, the view is looking back at the island from the top of the levee. The lot is 50 feet wide and about 200 ft long from the levee to the road. There's a drop of about 5 feet from the road to the lowest spot on the property. From the road height to the top of the levee is 16ft. The design that we are working on is three stories tall. We are using two stacks of three containers with a span of 16 feet between them. The span connecting the stacks is built of structural steel and glue laminated beams. The first level contains the garage and will lift the habitable parts of the building above the flood level. Most other houses on the island are built on top of pilings to raise them up, we are going to use hi cube cargo containers that sit on grade beams which are in turn set on helical piles.

When I visited the site for the first time I met with Steve from the Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District. He is in charge of maintaining the levee and is the first authority that must approve building plans. I asked him about the soil conditions and he said "So you don't know already?". This is always a very bad sign. He explained that below the topsoil was a layer of peat moss that was on average 32 feet deep. Peat has the consistency of a wet sponge and is so unstable it cannot be built on. Below that, however, was a bed of compressed gray sand that would support piles. Pile driving, as you might imagine, is very expensive in itself. But when you add the associated costs of civil, soils and structural engineering just to get you to a workable design the costs really add up. Steve did say that it was legal to build on a concrete slab directly on the ground but then pointed to a neighbors garage that had been built a couple of years before. The garage was nose diving about 5 degrees already. He added that the soils subsides about an inch and a half a year.

And so it's time to start the site work. The house is designed so that the habitable space starts close to the level of the top of the levee. The whole point of building here is the proximity to the river. Almost every house on Bethel Island is built along the levee, each with it's own dock. The building code dictates that no building can be higher than 35 feet from grade. Say the gray sand layer is currently 34 feet down. You start this process by hiring a soils engineer to bore test holes in the ground to determine the depth of the bed that you can build on. As every house on the island has had to do this you would think that this depth was a known quantity. The short answer is no, the process has to be repeated with each job. I've asked for proposals from two firms that have some experience of the island and am waiting for the bids. They will show up with a quote for the report plus whatever it costs to bore the holes. There are several methods to do the drilling and each has its own draw backs and features and they are all expensive. In the next installment I'll be discussing what we find. I'm willing to bet you right now that the learning curve is going to be sharp and expensive.

Recovery

2009-10-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

Since August I've started getting inquiries about building container structures from various places. Things are picking up, and it's high time. The week after the Build It Green tour the market collasped. Four hundred people came to look at what a container house could be. The immediate response was terrific but we all know how the rest of the year played out. So when my phone rang I was more than happy to arrange a tour. I've added more interior pictures in this post to give you a better idea of what we built.

A couple in Santa Cruz, California actually came to Portland to see the 42nd Street project. They called a few day's after I gave them a tour and asked if I was interested in building a modified copy of the Portland model. They had a limited, but adequate, budget and the land. The land turned out to be a beautiful hillside site just a mile or so from downtown. They had a road and a well with good water and perk tested geology suitable for septic. I know what the costs are to build and I'd be able to use the same engineering so I was confident that we could bring the project in with the capital they had, until we asked what the permit was going to cost. I spent a week in Santa Cruz to do the site survey with them and talk to the permit authorities to confirm costs.

California, as you may have heard, is bankrupt. The county of Santa Cruz is broke too. They are, however, still staffed up and need to bring in money to make payroll. They aren't honest enough to tell you outright what the permit cost will eventually be. Our first quote was $11,077 for the submittal fee. What they didn't say was that after reviewing the plans they would return with comments that would need to be addressed. But before they would look at your response they wanted the client to deposit $20,000 that they could bill hourly against. So were up to $31,077 with no permit in site. The plans are distributed to 11 departments which all comment and find reasons to bill. A local builder that I spoke with said they seldom issued a single family home permit for less than $60,000. The client called in a favor and we got a meeting with a senior planner that confirmed all this, he said "the county has been forced to go into fee collecting mode" This project is based on building a 640 square foot house, not some high end mansion.
At this rate the cost of the permits which didn't even hook up to any municipal utilities would run about the same as the actual cost of construction. The client said they'd get back to me when they could arrange the additional financing.

I got a call from Chennai, India from a guy that was looking for a builder qualified to teach his shop workers the basics of container modification. He has an ambitious plan to build various structures from containers. It took me a week to unpack and understand the scope of the plans that he emailed me. He wanted to market every thing from single container retail shops to multi container prefabricated schools. He expressed that he had a large transnational engineering firm to support the project and the investment capital to see it through. I thought, "this is it", a late career move to do exactly what I wanted, expand to concept of container structures to a global market. We traded emails for about a month that were supposed to lead to a four to six week trip to India. Everything we talked about looked very promising until we started talking about money. I've done business in the far east before. I know that once you've transferred all the intellectual property, the actual know how, that's it. You come home with wages but no future prospects. In order to book that sort of time out of town you'd expect that they could come up with a retainer. I even offered to send them my engineering that represents all the basic container modifications. I haven't heard from them since. In this age of global internet connectivity you never really know who your talking to. My best guess is that Prem, the guy I was talking to was just some kid with a well thought out idea that he thought he could string together. But when it came down to it he didn't really have any idea what this kind of thing entails. I'd love to work on a project like that someday but I guess India will have to wait until I get that $2500 retainer.

The news reports say that the economy is picking up steam, that we're in recovery. That's great news. I'm hoping that I'll hear from somebody that needs an builder with container experience, I'm available. I can travel to any location and help with everything from planning and logistics to construction.

One Year Out

2009-09-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

It's been a year since I built the container house on NE 42nd Street. Shorty after the Build It Green tour the housing market collasped. The tour was my best chance of marketing my skills here in Portland, my timing for this was off. I rented the house to a nice couple that are very happy living in it. They are amazed how quiet it is inside even living on a busy street. They also share the information from their electric bill, which I'm happy to report, is very low. I've had no issues related to the construction aside from the need to install and run a dehumidifier during the coldest part of the year. Two human beings can create a lot of water vapor just by breathing. The house is so well sealed that it was necessary to either install a heat exchanger that cycled outside air in or rely on dehumidifier to remove the water vapor. The fan in the bathroom that I was counting on to this couldn't draw new air into the structure so I decided to go the other route for the time being and remove humidity mechanically.

I found a heat exchanger design with a good cubic feet / minute rating in the August issue of Maker Magazine that I'm going to build and install this fall. It uses two 12 volt computer fans to circulate air without much heat loss. These can be run continuously with very little energy input and should alleviate the need for the dehumidifier which is much more power hungry and requires service to empty the reservoir. I should note here that we haven't noticed any mold in the structure and that our efforts along these lines are proactive. It will also help the bath fan improve it's function.

Build It Green

2008-09-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

On Saturday September 20, the City of Portland's Office of Sustainable Development sponsored a the Build It Green home tour. My house, at 5135 NE 42nd Street, along with 18 others were included as examples of sustainable development. I estimate that well over 500 people came through my home on the tour. Portland is an amazing place. It's filled with creative, forward thinking people that spend their time being involved in bettering our world. I'd like to thank several people for their help.

Bill Fritz of Intelligent Design for providing all the home furnishings that made our house the most stylish stop on the tour.

Fredrick Zal of Zal Architecture helped me greet our visitors and explain the potential of our vision of creative reuse.

Valerie Garrett from the City of Portland who organized the Build It Green tour.

I hope that those of you that visited my home were inspired that even off beat projects like mine can be built in a city that prides itself on its commitment to the future. I'm proud of my fellow citizens for coming by to see what we accomplished. And I look forward to hearing from those of you that want to start projects of your own like this. Whether you just need a little advise or you need someone with the skills and experience to build for you I'll be available to help.

I'm proud to call Portland home.

Chris Radcliffe
thechrisradcliffe@gmail.com

Let's Talk About Cost

2008-09-13T17:09:00.001-07:00

I've worked on all different types of homes. Historic remodels to new construction. And the thing that always struck me is just how is a kid, starting out, going to be able to afford a home?

Owning a home is a lot more than just paying for a house. It anchors you to your community in a way that until I owned a home I'd never considered. Just how attached can you be to a place if your paying rent. If you don't like your neighbors you can just move. If the street you live on is getting trashed you move. If you own a home you stand and fight. You do things like look out for the neighbors kids and pick up stuff that blew into your yard. Because you know your going to be there a while. The first container guest house that I built cost me $3200.00. It was a single twenty foot standard container (160 square feet). I salvaged almost everything from from places like the Rebuilding center in Portland. I did all the work as well but in the end I had a well insulated little house with a hot shower and toilet.

My point is that even a kid fresh out of school can save up that kind of money. Sure, that's not a lot of room but this kind of construction is modular. If you want more room you can expand as you need it. And there's always little bits of land around that you can put something like this on. I wanted to be able to offer a way to home ownership to someone that couldn't front the usual paperwork to a bank. It's one way to improve the world, a little bit at a time.

It's also got the benefit of creative reuse. 85% of the mass of this house is recycled. I made sure that everything I could from the windows and doors to the boxes themselves had a previous life, it makes ethical and economic sense. In the end my costs on the 640 square foot house in Portland came to about $51.00 a square foot. That includes all the permits and professional services, as well. Simple modern remodels cost at least twice that. Labor costs are going to make that price higher if you can't do any of the work but if your into a little sweat equity those costs can be controlled too.

A couple of other points;

If you keep it painted steel doesn't go anywhere. These homes will be standing long after every thing around it has rotted to the ground. The average modern house has to be almost completely rebuilt every forty years.

They don't have to look like cargo containers when your done working on them. You can sheet these things in any material you chose and blend them into any neighborhood. Even someplace as historic as New Orleans.

This photo was of my first container house at 1140 Carondelet St. New Orleans, Louisiana.

Design Considerations

2008-09-13T15:51:00.001-07:00

At its most basic the requirements of any habitable structure is that it's got to be warm, safe and dry. If your going to build with multiple cargo containers there are several factors that you have to take into consideration to fulfill these requirements.

Cargo containers are made to stack, we all know that, but they have to stack on the corners. Any design that stacks containers any other way was probably done by someone that has never built with containers. The whole point of using containers is that they are an inexpensive way of providing structure. If you have to buy a lot of very expensive steel to support a design that does not stack on corners than what is the point of using containers in the first place. I know that this places limits on the designs that you can create but stacking on corners is the basis of safe design.

Cargo containers are made to shed water while they are in motion. When they are standing static on foundations they will not drain. The roof of a container is typically a flat piece of sheet metal with corrugation stamped into it to make it rigid. The weight of the material it is constructed out of will cause it to dip down toward the center in places. Water will pool there and rise until it reaches the seam where two containers come together. Even if this seam is welded it will never be waterproof and that will cause you trouble. So if your design features more than one container you have to consider a roof system of some sort.

Condensation on the inside surface of a container must be dealt with. Water vapor condenses on any surface that has a temperature differential between the exterior and interior of more than a few degrees. You can deal with this by applying different types of insulation systems to accommodate the climate your building in. Get good advise here. After you've sheeted and found that water is running down the interior wall and puddling on the floor its too late. The good news here is that insulation as a percentage of building cost is cheap. And because of the low air infiltration that building with steel boxes gives you the cost of heating the structure will be cheap. How cheap? I used one electric cadet wall heater to keep a 640 square foot home toasty all winter here in Portland, and its quiet too.

Remember; warm, safe and dry.

Foundations

2008-09-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

Your containers are going to sit on footings. Footings are the part of a foundation that is dug from the ground and filled with rebar, inbed points and concrete. The footings need only be placed at each corner of each container. The acceptable size of a corner footing is 24"x24" and 16" deep. Where two containers are joined the footing underneath that point should be 36"x36" and 16" deep. At any point that the structure must be supported with an internal column you must support the point load with another 24" square footing.

This use of footings as opposed to perimeter wall or slab foundations is one of the major cost savings gained by using containers. I hired an architect to design my footings because city inspectors and plan reviewers like to look at blueprint drawings with an architect's stamp. Otherwise I would have foregone the cost (about $800.00) and done my own drawings on Corel Draw. When your working on a project that doesn't conform to prescriptive building methods its best to hire this kind of work done for you, if you show up at the building department with stamped plans they don't look at you like your some wacko. Trust me its better to buy your credibility on the cheap this way than to climb over the hurdles that a plan reviewer can demand.

A word here on terms:

#4 rebar (the kind you want to use in these footings) is that stuff that looks about 1/2" thick. Your going to want to form up two squares per footing about 8" above one another and at least 3" clear of the soil.

Inbed points; 3/4" Threaded stainless steel rod with a 1/2" thick 4"x4" steel plate attached at the bottom with a nut. The rod will stick out of the finished concrete and allows you to bolt another steel plate the same size onto the top of the footing. When the containers are placed on the footing this will give you a place to weld the container to the footing. Where two containers come together use two rods and make the plate 4"x8".
(This next part is comes to you as a piece of hard earned wisdom.) This weld is what makes the structure permanent as opposed to a temporary structure. This is important when an appraiser gives you the fish eye and says it just a mobile home and not a house. You will be able to point at the weld and the fact that the electrical meter is mounted on the container and not on a separate pole and say with confidence that its a permanent structure. Conversely if the city inspector is giving you grief about your project (because you didn't pull permits) than you can not weld down to the inbed point and claim its a temporary structure (like a mobile home) and you don't need a new house permit. (Always get the footing permit and have it inspected before you set the containers. This way you can choose which way to go when your deeper in the process.)

Concrete: You might not realize that you can now buy concrete mixed on site in just the amount you need buy calling a short load service. They have a special truck that carries the raw mix materials and will feed it down a shoot into your forms. This is a lot less work and expense than renting a concrete pumper truck and having to deal with a redi-mix truck. The redi-mix trucks usually won't cross your property line for fear of getting stuck and they want you to buy minimums that are going to be more than you need. A short load truck will pull right up to a dry site and save you these problems.

I trust that if your getting into a project like this that you can accurately read a measuring tape and know what a framing square is. In addition to these a good quality laser level will keep you out of trouble. If you need to build forms to make your foundations level at both ends build them four times as strong as you think they need to be, concrete is heavy and you don't want to clean up a mess if the form breaks while your buddy's stand there laughing there asses off, seriously.

This has not actually happened to me but its been close.

2008-09-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

(Question)

Hey,
I saw you posts on Inhabit and will most definitely attend this years Build It Green tour.
I live in PDX land and was wondering a few things.
What sort of, if any, setbacks did you face to build this home in the city limits?
Did you build off site or on-site? (ie. containers electrical/plumbing/etc.)
I've been excited to see someone local explore this for a long time.

Doug

(Answer)

Its considered non standard building practice (not wood framed) so you have to conform to the standards of steel building construction. In practice this means that you have to have an engineer calculate the reinforcements that must be added whenever you pierce the walls (doors, windows and interior wall removal). The reinforcment welds must be done by a certified welder and inspected by an independent testing agency. I had the panels that I wanted removed cut and welded before I moved the containers on site. In order to meet energy code the interior was framed on site and insulated, utilities were added the normal way.

CDR

PS. Thats my dad in the photo, I still use some of his tools.

Building With Cargo Containers (introduction)

2008-09-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

This blog has been created to answer questions about using conex shipping containers as habitable space. I'll be covering all the issues that came up when I built the structure located at 5135 NE 42nd Street Portland, Oregon. The City of Portland maintains a website called Portlandmaps.com, you can use this website and the above address to see which permits were pulled. Rather than sit and write a complete book about this project I will answer questions posed in the comments part of this blog, or you can email me at thechrisradcliffe@gmail.com and I will post them to this blog.

I think a little personal information is in order so that you can judge the level of skills necessary to pull off a project like this. Most of my professional experience in the building trades came from 15 years in the electrical sign industry. I've been involved in all phases of the design and fabrication to the installation and service of large electrical neon signs in San Francisco. This experience gave me an appreciation of most of the basic skills required in the building trades. In addition to the practical experience of sign work I also worked as an account executive for various sign companies. In this capacity I was able to develop the skills that help estimate costs and manage projects to completion. I was also responsible for pulling permits and seeing the projects though the necessary design review processes that municipalities use to make sure that that a project is both safe and fits into the community.

I left San Francisco in 2000 and moved to New Orleans. I bought and remodeled a 1867 coffee warehouse into my home and commercial rental. In the next five years I went on to work on various projects from a 1870s fire house to the major reconstuction of an 1820s antebullum mansion in the Lower Garden District. I'm very proud of the fact that nothing I worked on in New Orleans suffered any damage by Katrina or any of the hurricanes that plauge the gulf coast. In each of these projects one of my first purchases was a shipping container. They provide me with secure storage for the tools and materials used in constuction. As the last detail of each job I finished out the shipping container as a guest house on the property. I'd sheet the exterior of the container to appear consistant with the main structure.

When I sold my property in New Orleans in 2006 I was given the full square foot value of the container as I got for the house. This caused me to consider constucting a full home from multipule containers. Eventually I settled in Portland, Oregon. I bought the old Hare Khrisna temple on NE 42nd Street. It had a garage that was racked and about to fall over so it was perfect for the project we are going to discuss in this blog.

I'd like to thank you for your interst in my project and I wish you the best of luck building your dreams. I'd be happy to do anything I can do to help you with the construction of your own container house.

Chris Radcliffe, September 2008